I know that Genki is pretty highly talked about as a resource. I was wondering what was the necessities of the parts.By this I mean, if I were to buy Genki 1, there is a text, a workbook, and an answer key. Is the workbook based on the text or could I just get the workbook and work on the activities in it? Also, is the answer key necessary? Is there any other way to check your answers without it? Or what about just getting the text? Are there activities in it that I could do instead of getting the workbook?

Just wondering since all 3 books is near 100 dollars and wanted to know if all 3 were vital.

You get out what you put in. Whether or not something is 'vital' is subjective, I suppose. You could learn Japanese with just the textbook. It has exercizes for each chapter like other textbooks you might be familiar with.

Workbooks provide additional reinforcement, drilling more of the same concepts. It would help to solidify anything you learn in the text. I call that vital. Some other people might call it unnecessary.

The stronger your foundation, the easier your studies will progress. But if cost is a problem and you only want to get one thing, get the textbook. It's what actually teaches the material... the workbook assumes you have read the text.

There are some excercises in the textbook at the end of each lesson you can do but I strongly reccomend the workbook with the textbook. The excercises in the workbook are good practice. As Sairana said, don't just buy the workbook alone since it won't teach you anything and is there to help you practice what you learned in the textbook.

As for the answer key, I heard most of it is in Kanji which might make it harder for someone learning the material to understand the answers written in there but this is only what I've heard. I could be wrong.

kilometers wrote:As for the answer key, I heard most of it is in Kanji which might make it harder for someone learning the material to understand the answers written in there but this is only what I've heard. I could be wrong.

Any words written with kanji have no furigana, but these words should have either been introduced in the related part of the textbook or before it I believe.

By and large, a lot of the workbook stuff is checkable by looking through the book's grammar sections and whatnot. I did the first textbook on my own from about mid-July through the end of August, and I could almost always tell when I was wrong by looking back in the book to cross-reference grammatical constructions and/or a kanji here or there. The Genki books are pretty well adapted for self-study. Plus, you can always just ask someone on here if you're unsure.

I started chapter 3 yesterday, however, I don't really know hot to study since Kanji have appeared, I mean, what should I do? Study Kanji alongside with grammar, that's I'm doing, but the book does not have the kanji per chapter, it mixes all the kanji in the last pages, and to look for the kanji I need may get boring.

If looking up kanji you need is boring, you are in for a seriously rough time studying Japanese. It's not all ninjas and pirates...

Agreed...

Unfortunately textbooks like Genki rarely do really good Kanji teaching.For that you need a separate Kanji book most times, or just look it up and do your best to memorize the, using flashcards, SRS ( Software for flashcards that uses spaced algorithms to turn short term to long term memory ), or the tried and true method of writing it our hundreds of times.

Welcome To Japanese, the long road, better try to enjoy the journey, it'll be a while.

It may be worth it to get a kanji dictionary before finishing genki to help you look up the kanji you are finding.Kodansha Kanji Learners Dictionary is a great one to start out with, has an easy look-up system for beginners.

Alternatively, you may be able to find a Kanji list online somewhere OF the Kanji in Genki and if you can, this makes using an online dictionary fairly easy

Glad to hear you don't mind the long droning parts of learning the language, as there will be many.

I have the genki series and use a combination of http://www.jisho.org to look up the kanji using romaaji and Essential Kanji for the penji. The best way is to write it out many many many times. It works for nearly all of the kanji. It's best to try to solidify each chapter's kanji before you move onto the exercises for active recall instead of passive. As for the workbook and answer book (the text is the most important one) you can go without. It will be hard to practice, but you buddy up and practice what you learned in each chapter with your friend. If you can buy the workbook, DO. It is extremely helpful. Any questions, feel free to contact me.

* I have a question about the irregular verb 持って motte. From what I gather, motte iru means to have, motte kuru means to bring. Would motte kimasu be the correct way to conjugate motte kuru? Anything else that I should know about?

Why thank You Chris. That is what I thought. I find it queer that Genki would put that verb in the irregular, but turns out that the verb motsu is in there as well, as a regular u- verb. Genki loves teaching you things as a whole, rather than breaking it down.